About three years ago in 2014, James Cheshire created the Population Lines Print, a stylized map using lines to show population density in the world. It uses roughly the same data visualization style used in the Joy Division cover.

credit: James Cheshire

How can you create a nice-looking map like this? Ask no more. James has recently shared the R script and a bit of the history behind his map. Henrik Lindberg has also generously written a gist with a simple and reproducible code to create a map with the same style showing the distribution of the population density in Europe, using R and ggplot2.